Related papers: Digital Einstein Experience: Fast Text-to-Speech f…

We present CharacterChat, a concept and chatbot to support writers in creating fictional characters. Concretely, writers progressively turn the bot into their imagined character through conversation. We iteratively developed CharacterChat…

Nowadays vast amounts of speech data are recorded from low-quality recorder devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and medium-quality microphones. The objective of this research was to study the automatic generation of high-quality…

The article further develops and formalizes a theory of friendly dialogue in an AI System of Dr. Watson type, as proposed in our previous publication[4],[19]. The main principle of this type of AI is to guide the user toward a solution in a…

Existing text-to-speech systems predominantly focus on single-sentence synthesis and lack adequate contextual modeling as well as fine-grained performance control capabilities for generating coherent multicast audiobooks. To address these…

Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human…

Voice design from natural language aims to generate speaker timbres directly from free-form textual descriptions, allowing users to create voices tailored to specific roles, personalities, and emotions. Such controllable voice creation…

Custom voice is to construct a personal speech synthesis system by adapting the source speech synthesis model to the target model through the target few recordings. The solution to constructing a custom voice is to combine an adaptive…

End-to-end neural TTS has achieved superior performance on reading style speech synthesis. However, it's still a challenge to build a high-quality conversational TTS due to the limitations of the corpus and modeling capability. This study…

One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected…

We propose TextToon, a method to generate a drivable toonified avatar. Given a short monocular video sequence and a written instruction about the avatar style, our model can generate a high-fidelity toonified avatar that can be driven in…

Speech data has rich acoustic and paralinguistic information with important cues for understanding a speaker's tone, emotion, and intent, yet traditional large language models such as BERT do not incorporate this information. There has been…

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased use of remote telephonic interviews, making it important to distinguish between scripted and spontaneous speech in audio recordings. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for identifying read…

We address the problem of cross-speaker style transfer for text-to-speech (TTS) using data augmentation via voice conversion. We assume to have a corpus of neutral non-expressive data from a target speaker and supporting conversational…

Speech-driven talking heads have recently emerged and enable interactive avatars. However, real-world applications are limited, as current methods achieve high visual fidelity but slow or fast yet temporally unstable. Diffusion methods…

In this paper, we propose an architecture to solve a novel problem statement that has stemmed more so in recent times with an increase in demand for virtual content delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All educational institutions,…

Virtual humans have gained considerable attention in numerous industries, e.g., entertainment and e-commerce. As a core technology, synthesizing photorealistic face frames from target speech and facial identity has been actively studied…

Parallel text-to-speech models have been widely applied for real-time speech synthesis, and they offer more controllability and a much faster synthesis process compared with conventional auto-regressive models. Although parallel models have…

Generating lifelike conversational avatars requires modeling not just isolated speakers, but the dynamic, reciprocal interaction of speaking and listening. However, modeling the listener is exceptionally challenging: direct audio-driven…

Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) involves vividly imagining personal future events and experiences in detail. It has shown promise as an intervention to reduce delay discounting-the tendency to devalue delayed rewards in favor of immediate…

We present a voice conversion framework that converts normal speech into dysarthric speech while preserving the speaker identity. Such a framework is essential for (1) clinical decision making processes and alleviation of patient stress,…